AirPR Debuts 'NEO' Capability For Message Testing

Since launching in 2011, AirPR has been working on technology to streamline the PR business. The startup’s latest iteration is a feature it’s called “news engine optimization” — or NEO. The idea being for PR use search to inform brand messaging.

NEO, which is a part of AirPR’s measurement platform Analyst, mines search engines, search terms that are inputted and search results as outputs to give brands some insight into the soundbites that are working across news sites and social media.

As an example, AirPR looked at the phrases that resonated around Virgin America’s new safety that debuted last year. What they found was even though the video itself has taken in more than nine million views on YouTube, some of its key soundbites didn’t resonate. For instance, the phrase “safety dance” got low pickup compared to the more conventional “safety video.” On a similar analysis on Southwest Airlines, AirPR found that “cheap flights” had nearly four times the pickup on social media as “flexible fares.”

“Essentially, NEO allows you to A/B test your key terms so you can optimize all future PR and marketing efforts,” AirPR states in a whitepaper issued today.

There are some parallels between NEO and the internal dashboard that Ford built with Ogilvy PR that aggregates commonly searched words about Ford from Google to figure out how consumers are coming across content about the company.The Ford dashboard tests relevant keywords against Google News to see how many new pieces are connected to a word each day.

Ultimately, the AirPR whitepaper advocates the value of NEO by pointing out “If you see a phrase is gaining momentum you can identify it; then start incorporating it into future communications in order to increase the search impact.”